Windows Tip: Getting RunAs back in Vista

For the last while I've been on the Service Pack 1 beta for Windows Vista and in my opinion SP1 has fixed most of the issues the original RTM release had, especially performance issues. So I'm confident that enterprises will begin accelerating their deployment plans for Vista now that SP1 is about to be released. One thing is still missing from Vista however, and that's the capability you had in XP to right-click on a program or shortcut on your desktop or in Windows Explorer, select RunAs, and run the program with any credentials you want to specify. Instead, Vista replaced this feature with Run As Administrator, which lets you run a program as an administrator (if you know the credentials for an admin account) while logged on to your computer as a standard user.

But what if you want to run a program using different (non-administrator) credentials? This has been a major complaint among some enterprises as some management applications need to be run using a special account, or may even require running under domain admin creds-and logging onto a Vista workstation (or any workstation for that matter) using domain admin creds is not a very good idea (get the Windows Server 2008 Security Resource Kit from Microsoft Press when it's released to find out
why).

A workaround you can use is to use runas.exe from the command-line, which still works the same way it did in XP. But if you work more with the Explorer shell than from the command-line, this loss of right-click'n'runas functionality is frustrating. Another workaround is to create a shortcut to runas.exe that specifies the program you want to run and the credentials you want it to run under. For example, you could create a shortcut to

C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe/user:CONTOSO\Administrator "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"

and when you double-click on the shortcut you can type the password for the Administrator account in the CONTOSO domain and Internet Explorer will launch using these credentials. This is tedious though if you have a lot of different programs you need to run this way.

Is there no hope for bringing back RunAs to Vista? You bet they do! Just a couple of days ago, Mark Russinovich, the creator of the Windows SysInternals suite of power tools, released a new tool called ShellRunas which lets you add back the right-click'n'runas functionality you had in XP. Just download the package from here, unzip it, run shellrunas /reg from the directory you unzipped it to, and Presto! You can right-click on a program in Explorer and get Run As Different User as an option.

So does Microsoft listen to their customers? Well, Mark does, anyway -- thanks Mark!